Solana hits 100K TPS milestone with stress test transaction spike

Solana throughput briefly spiked to six figures under a high load of program call transactions over the weekend, according to a developer. 

Mert Mumtaz, the co-founder of the Solana developer tooling firm Helius, said on Sunday that Solana became the “first major blockchain” to record 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) on its mainnet.

He shared that a Solana block late on Sunday saw 43,016 successful transactions and 50 failed ones, claiming the total TPS reached 107,540.

However, most transactions were not token exchanges or trades but no-operation or “noop” program calls, an instruction that doesn’t perform meaningful computation or state changes. 

Solana transactions must include at least one instruction, so for transactions that don’t need to perform any meaningful operations, the noop program provides a way to satisfy this requirement. These lightweight program calls stress-test network capacity but don’t directly reflect everyday payment or complex application use.

Solana block with noop program call transaction spike. Source: Mert Mumtaz

Mumtaz said that even though most of the transactions were program calls, developers could still “deduce that you can also theoretically do about 80-100k tps in transfers, oracle updates, and similar [operations].”

Solana’s real TPS much lower 

Solana’s actual throughput is much lower than these anomalous spikes caused by no-action program calls. 

Total TPS is currently around 3,700 according to Solscan, but even that figure is spurious because around two-thirds of the transactions are voting transactions. 

Solana validators must regularly submit vote transactions to participate in consensus, and hundreds of them voting multiple times per slot inflates the network’s true TPS figures. 

Real throughput on Solana is around 1,050 transactions per second, according to Solscan and around 1,004 TPS, according to Chainspect. 

Real Solana TPS is much lower than the total figures. Source: Chainspect

Memecoins still dominate 

Solana derives the majority of its activity from memecoins. The most popular platform on the network, with a 62% share of the total value locked, is the memecoin minting and trading platform Pump.fun, according to Solscan.

The value of Solana’s decentralized finance apps has climbed over the past few months, reaching $10.7 billion, close it its January all-time high, according to DefiLlama. 

Solana (SOL $181.21), the blockchain’s token, dipped over the weekend as crypto markets cooled, falling back to $187 from last week’s high of $208.

The token remains down 36% from its January all-time high of $293, according to CoinGecko.